Let us see why this is so. Most children go to primary school and then to grammar school and perhaps to high school and college, or to some private school. This exhibition plainly shows us that there is a new kind of school, that there are new lessons and new teachers coming. Books we must have. To learn, we must read; but we may read all about boats, and yet we can never learn to sail a boat till we take the tiller in hand and trim the sail before the breeze. The book will help wonderfully in telling us the names of things in the boat and, if we have read about sailing, we shall more quickly learn to sail; but we certainly never shall learn till we are in a real boat. We can read in a book how to turn a heel in knitting, and may commit to memory whole rules about “throwing off two and purl four,” and all the rest; yet where is the girl who can learn to knit without having the needles in her hands? This then is the idea of the new school—to use the hands as well as the eyes. Boys and girls who go to the ordinary schools, where only books are used, will graduate knowing a great deal; but a boy who goes to one of these new schools, where, besides the books, there are pencils and tools, work-benches as well as writing-books, will know more. The other boys and girls may forget more than half they read, but he will remember everything he learned at the drawing-table or at the work-bench, as long as he lives. He will also remember more of that which he reads because his work with his hands helps him to understand what he reads. [Illustration: EXHIBIT OF THE AMATEUR TECHNICAL UNION.] Again, a boy who goes to one of the new schools, where once a week he spends two hours in a shop, and works with his hands, say to make a square block of wood “true,”—exact to the hundredth part of an inch,—will soon see that bad work is not square, is not true and fair. A piece of false work will seem ugly and show bad workmanship. He will go out of the shop proud that he can do true work; and all false things, whether in wood or only in thought, will seem bad and wrong to that boy. He can not make a crooked joint in woodwork and be satisfied; neither is he likely to be content with crooked work in word or deed. The four thousand children whose work filled that exhibition hall, read books and study lessons precisely as do you; but they do more. For two, or perhaps four, hours every week they lay down their books and take up those splendid tools, the pencil, the needle, the hammer, the saw, and the file. Are they any less readers than those who only read? No; they are better readers, because they are workers; because by work they better understand reading.